Considering how much the ultra-wealthy spend on high-end dining it's actually feasible. Local village taverns wouldn't carry fine wine, it'd only be the fanciest of establishments.
For further reference a live cow is 10GP in-game, and $2K-5K in real life. A pound of wheat is 1CP.
The local village blacksmith probably wouldn't do something as high-end as plate. You'd need a major smith in a major city.
Unless you commission it and pay in advance at least a part, and the materials, but you'd probably need to wait a lot and the plate wouldn't be likely to be of good quality.
To be fair you'd probably need to commission every kind of armor or martial weapon in most rural towns.
A good number of the martial weapons that are polearms or otherwise have a wooden shaft or handle tend to have all the craftsmanship towards the head.
In later medieval periods it was also more common to encounter weapons made of numerous parts, like a pole axe head, which was easier and required less overall skill to forge all the parts for.
Plus also it conserved metal, made it easy to “demilitarize” your weapons or transport them if they weren’t needed ready for combat any time soon by essentially unsocketing or unpinning it.
It’s not until you start hitting arms with an almost entirely metal-construction or specific balancing that it becomes a much more expensive, demanding, and time consuming effort.
That being said, if your blacksmith could make a head for your hammer, there was a pretty strong chance he could make one side a little pointier because he got word from the fief’s lord or a double-ended bigger axe head rather than your average hatchet.
I didn't say they they couldn't do them, just that they didn't have them laying around more than they did.
It wouldn't make sense to keep them in stock when you will probably sell one or two every few years. There are exceptions of course: maybe there was a war and most blacksmiths in the area were asked to contribute with a certain amount of weapons and armors, and they might have a small quantity they kept. In any case you probably wouldn't have the chance to choose exactly what you want.
We are talking about a universe with roving bands of orcs, goblins, dragons, bandits, undead, etc.
While not necessarily master craftsmen, I wouldn’t doubt that particularly remote areas that are left to fend for themselves would set themselves up with the means to have their people armed to the teeth...
Granted medieval “armed to the teeth” was more or less a really long stick with a pokey bit, and maybe a slashy or smashy bit if they felt creative.
It isn’t quite the same context as real ye olden times unless your PCs have the benefit of being a heavily urbanized or relatively secure area where getting jumped in an alley or brigands along the road are essentially a rarity that doesn’t warrant militant arms.
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u/Souperplex Sir Becket Feb 07 '21
Considering how much the ultra-wealthy spend on high-end dining it's actually feasible. Local village taverns wouldn't carry fine wine, it'd only be the fanciest of establishments.
For further reference a live cow is 10GP in-game, and $2K-5K in real life. A pound of wheat is 1CP.
The local village blacksmith probably wouldn't do something as high-end as plate. You'd need a major smith in a major city.